Video: Outputting pregraded shots for the edit from SpeedGrade

I imagine most people who are new to Adobe SpeedGrade will think of it as being an application that sits to the end of the chain. And in most cases, that's probably the case. You're going to finish off your edit in Premiere Pro or perhaps After Effects, and then you're perhaps going to send over it to SpeedGrade. To really complete a fine quality grade, you're going to finish off the color perfectly with Adobe SpeedGrade. But actually, you can use SpeedGrade at the very, very beginning of the chain as well.

One of the great strengths of the Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium 6 is the seamless integration between the various applications. Even so, the best-practice approach to sharing media and creative work between applications remains mysterious to many users. In this course filmmaker and author Maxim Jago breaks everything down into simple, clear steps, offering guidance on project and file management and examples that demonstrate the best use of the technology. If you use Adobe Creative Suite CS6 for video post-production, this course can make your work faster, easier, and more efficient.

Topics include:

Improving speech-to-text analysis with Story

Organizing projects in Prelude

Batch renaming with Bridge

Preparing images for video in Illustrator

Working with Photoshop files in Premiere Pro

Round-tripping a soundtrack from Premiere Pro to Audition and back again

Outputting pregraded shots for the edit from SpeedGrade

I imagine most people who are new to Adobe SpeedGrade will think of it as being an application that sits to the end of the chain. And in most cases, that's probably the case. You're going to finish off your edit in Premiere Pro or perhaps After Effects, and then you're perhaps going to send over it to SpeedGrade. To really complete a fine quality grade, you're going to finish off the color perfectly with Adobe SpeedGrade. But actually, you can use SpeedGrade at the very, very beginning of the chain as well.

You can use it to apply a pregrade to your assets before you bring them into Premiere Pro. There are a few benefits to doing this, one is that it allows you to get a sense of the usable assets and those that you can't save in post, I suppose. But also, it can speed up the edit considerably. Because if you're not looking for a particularly advanced finish or look to a media, you just want everything to fit together. Then you can make that happen in SpeedGrade. Especially if you've got consistent differences between the shots from different camera and different camera angles.

The question is though, how do you then generate the copies of your media ready for the edit? So, here I've got a simple timeline in SpeedGrade and I've got a series of shots. Let's say I've already applied a grade to these and they're actually pretty different. I've got various different kinds of media, they're mixed and matched here. But let's say I'm ready to output these, I'm happy with how they fit together,. But at the moment, there's just one long line of shots. There's no particular order to these. I'm just using a timeline as a holding place for me to apply my different grading adjustments to the clips.

But if I go to Output, I've got my various options in SpeedGrade here to specify the quality, and the Codec and the format for my output. But what I'm particularly interested in is here. Under file name. Now, you can type in a file name and you're just going to get the entire content of your timeline as one file, if you do do that. But there's another way. If I show you back in the directory content the media, you see here I've got my video as said. And inside of there, I've got this end of your noise clip. And then as a subdirectory, I've got this Paladin folder with the Paladin shots in it.

So, it'd be quite useful to have a folder called video and then a subfolder called Paladin that has the barest assets that were originally in those folders. So when I output, I'm going to get each of these clips inside a vertical Paladin, and one click inside the parent directory called Video. I think that kind of makes sense. So, I'm going to go to output, and under File Name, instead of typing in a file name, I'm going to click on this M button. And then, under Common, I've got this option, Source Path Element.

And I've got 0, 1, and 2. Now, the logic here is kind of reversed in my head. Maybe it makes better sense to you, but what this means is zero is the original file name that the clip had. And we're going to get a separate file for each of the original clips in our sequence. Source Path Element 1 is the name of the containing directory, and Source Path Element 2 is the name of the parent directory for that folder. So, we get a preview of this, it, it kind of makes sense if you do it.

I'm going to start by choosing Source Path Element 2, and you can see that's giving me the name video.mav. And it's called video.mav because I'm about to output a MAV file, and the name video is coming from the name of that folder. If I now type in a backslash, and then I'm going to click on the name again and I'm going to choose source Parf Element 1. Now, you can begin to see what's happening here. We've got, I know it's, it's kind of dark grey on dark grey, but you've got Video, which is the name of the parent directory.

Followed by the next parent directory name, which is Source Path 1. Followed by the file extension. If I now click, well let me first, we'll put in another backslash because I'm going to tell SpeedGrade that we want to have a containing directory with that name. I'm now going to click on M again. And I'm going to choose Source Path Element 0. And now things are starting to make a lot more sense. And let's look at this backwards. I've got the file name itself. That's inside the folder that the original file was in, and that's inside the folder that that folder was in.

So, I've got the file path that matches, and this is pretty important because you might well have media that was originally organized. You want to maintain that organizational system. This preview is dynamic. So, if I drag my play head along here, over to the right, there's that other clip that's not in the Paladin folder, it's in the Video folder. So again, because I'm using the Source Path Element 2 option, I'm getting that media access directory name for it as well. To output in this way, I'm probably going to want to specify the time code source, too.

So, instead of choosing the time code position, which is going to break the link to my original media time code. I'm going to choose Source, and again this means that each of my clips is going to have the time code that it originally had. If I now clicked to Render, I'm going to produce a series of clips that have the grade applied. So, I've made my color matching I've made everything fit together. I'm happy with the look but I still got my original file names, file extensions if I choose that format and my original time code. So, I'm absolutely in a great position to begin editing knowing that if I need to, I can easily locate my original media.

So, that's how you can use this file name setting in Adobe SpeedGrade to apply a pregrade to your media, and have it ready to work with in Premiere Pro.

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